Worst In The World: September 2014

Monday, 15 September 2014

Euro 2016: San Marino 0-2 Lithuania

Monday 8^th September 2014

European Championships Qualifying Group E

Stadio Olimpico, Serravalle, San Marino

San Marino 0-2 Lithuania

San Marino's Euro 2016 campaign got under way last week in Serravalle with a promising if ultimately futile performance from the boys in blue.

Two first half goals were sufficient to take the points for the Baltic nation, but the narrowness of the scoreline come full time with provide some small crumbs of comfort for San Marino. It was a bad start however, as Lithuania took the lead after just four minutes when Mindaugas Kalonas was put clear on the right hand side and crossed for Deivydas Matulevicius to prod home into an unguarded net.

Wednesday, 3 September 2014

European Championships Qualifier: San Marino v. Lithuania

European Championships Qualifier: San Marino v. Lithuania

Monday 8^th September 2014

European Championships Qualifying Group E

Stadio Olimpico, Serravalle, San Marino

San Marino get their Euro 2016 campaign up and running with a home fixture against Lithuania; a match which according to the world rankings represents San Marino’s best hope for avoiding a defeat in this group.

Best hope it may be but it’s a rather slim and unlikely one. Lithuania are currently ranked 103^rd by FIFA as compared to San Marino’s 208^th, but that does make them the second lowest ranked team in the group. For completeness, the other rankings are Switzerland (9^th), England (20^th), Slovenia (39^th) and Estonia (93^rd). It doesn’t sound quite so bad if I mention that Lithuania re the 45^th ranked European team, a mere 8 places above San Marino, but let’s be honest; the world ranking figure is a truer reflection in this case.

What's This All About?

It’s all too easy to focus on the successful teams in international football, Spain, Brazil, Germany etc. We all know what’s going on with them, usually winning, and can easily follow their crowning glories on the international stage. But what about life at the other end of the scale?

FIFA’s world rankings allow us to easily see who is officially the worst national football team in the world, and this site simply follows that team (or teams) until they manage to drag themselves kicking and screaming from the foot of the world rankings to be replaced by someone even worse. And then we follow them instead.

In the past the FIFA rankings made it clear who was the very worst of all, as the complex ranking formula rarely caused a tie for last place. Since 2006 the formula has been rather simplified, I won’t go into detail but many factors were removed to make things easier to understand. The result though is that down at the bottom of the rankings we often now have a cluster of ineptitude (or should it be a splat of ineptitude?) with several nations judged to equally as useless as each other for the simple reason that they lose all their games. In the past they’d have received some credit for a narrow defeat against a top side, but no more. To get off the bottom they are going to have to win or draw a match, something that often proves beyond most of them.

We’re here to highlight their struggles against hopelessness, and bring the occasional heart warming story of marginal success.